Posts Tagged ‘politics’

TL;DR Details of how the Labour party used an ersatz SIGINT operation against it’s own (prospective) members and supporters have come to light in the Forde Inquiry. This provides confirmation that the National Executive Committee (NEC) were excluding people for political expression on social media that didn’t align to their chosen ideology. Background Almost six […]


Here begins a new series for this blog… I’ve been writing to Craig Murray whilst he serves his prison sentence for contempt of court arising from his reporting of the Alex Salmond trial. I don’t recall how I first came across Craig, and his first book Murder in Samarkand, but I’ve been a keen follower […]


TL;DR If you can persuade people that their side is going to win without their vote, then perhaps just enough of them won’t bother to show up that you can steal the win. Background The two countries that I spend most of my time in (the UK and US) continue to recoil from the effects […]


TL;DR Organisations of all types are increasingly making decisions based on data and its analysis, but the rigour involved in this hasn’t yet entered our broader social discourse. I’m hopeful that we all start getting better access to data, and better understanding of the analysis and modelling process so that decisions can be made for […]


In my last post ‘The Surveillance Party‘ I wrote about how the UK Labour Party used their ersatz SIGINT operation to exclude me from their leadership election process. I was told ‘You posted inappropriate comments on social media on 5 July 2016’, so let’s take a look at my tweets and see what might have […]


TL;DR The UK Labour Party has been running an ersatz signals intelligence (SIGINT) operation to identify and exclude members and supporters that they don’t want voting in their leadership election; people who under some sort of criteria are identified as enemies of the party. This should be terrifying, as the difference between enemy of the […]


Our elected (and unelected) officials keep getting caught with their hands in the till by investigative journalists. The proposed remedy for this is to establish a register for lobbyists. A plan that the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) seems to be eagerly embracing (when it’s not saying that the plan needs to be even […]


I’ve been an avid follow of Andrew McAfee’s Blog ever since JP first pointed me in that direction. He’s clearly a man that understands how technology is reshaping how we do business. Whilst I was on holiday a few weeks ago I noticed that he’d published a book along with Erik Brynjolsson – Race Against […]


uncommon sense

07Oct09

What we call common sense is all about risk, choosing to take risk at an emotional level rather than having somebody with a risk assessment form show up and fill it out whilst wearing a hard hat and hi-vis jacket then finally saying “I wouldn’t if I were you, something bad might just happen”.


For @monadic, who forgot this was happening, and @stephenbonner who asked for a blog post summarising events – a short write up of last Friday’s Open Rights Group event, ‘resisting the all seeing eye’, featuring Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. Things got off to a fairly predictable start for anybody who follows Cory’s and Charlie’s […]